


To breathe the fire we was born in

by cooperjones2020



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Dirty Talk, Dom!Jug, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Porn With Plot, Porn with Feelings, future!Bughead, vacation!bughead, ~sort of domestic!bughead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-14 21:33:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11791893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cooperjones2020/pseuds/cooperjones2020
Summary: Filling the prompt “Smut or rather smut with feelings where Jughead wants to have sex with Betty while they look at themselves in the mirror, but she's feeling insecure about watching herself. He persuades her to do it, because watching her come is the hottest thing he has ever seen and he wants her to see that too” (from bughead-fanfic-wishlist.tumblr.com).





	To breathe the fire we was born in

**Author's Note:**

> Soundtrack to this fic is (obviously, as you will see) Springsteen’s “Born to Run” album, specifically the A side, but really you should just listen to all of it.  
> Title’s from “Backstreets” off that same album.

It’s their last night in the little log cabin in the mountains. From her seat on the porch step, Betty watches as the watercolour sunset melts away, only to be replaced by a circus troupe of lightning bugs.  She stretches out and crosses her legs, brown and bare under a loose dress, and leans back on her hands. Dried dirt falls off her toes in clouds of dust from where she’d tiptoed through the mud in search of cattail stalks and garlic mustard for their salad earlier.

The screen door behind her bangs shut and she tilts her head back to watch, upside down, as her boyfriend hands her a glass of wine and comes to sit beside her.

She shuffles closer to rest her head on his shoulder and slips her arm through his. The night air is still muggy, so the skin of his shoulder is damp where it comes out of the strap of his white tank top.

“I’m not ready to go home.”

“Me either.”

“Are you sure we have to go back?”

“I got no less than five texts from Archie yesterday about what a little monster Scout is being. I normally don’t get that many texts from him in a week.”

Betty laughs. “I got some from Veronica too. In retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have left a fifty pound sheepdog puppy with a guy who forgets to feed himself sometimes and a girl who thinks dogs should fit in purses so you can carry them on the subway.”

“Yeah well, you live and you learn. But that’s tomorrow’s problem.” Jughead turns and kisses Betty’s hair before resting his cheek on her head. “Tonight, the real world doesn’t exist. I have twelve more hours of having you all to myself.”

“Plus the two and half hours back to Riverdale and then three more home.”

“You’re sure we have to have lunch with your mother?”

“Stop it,” Betty nudges him with the elbow looped through his. “Mom’s really excited. And we haven’t been home since Polly’s wedding.”

“I know.” Jughead releases a long-suffering sigh. “I’m just not looking forward to more pointed comments about you busting your ass and your earning potential and the ‘instability of artistic careers.’ I  _know_  you’re basically supporting me and this relationship isn’t fifty fifty right now, but—”

“The book will sell, Jug.”

“Yeah. And maybe I’ll get lucky and there’ll be an email from my agent waiting for me.”

“Hey, we said no email-checking on this trip.”

“I’ll wait till we’re within the town limits. Then if there’s nothing, I’ll have at most five minutes to be disappointed before Alice Cooper commandeers all my brain cells.”

Betty smiles up at him, the corner of her lips curving down. “C’mere.”

Jughead tilts his head down toward her and she captures his lips in a kiss. Neither makes a move to deepen it, so it’s sweet, smouldering with the promise of things both past and to come. She sighs when she lets go and when she opens her eyes, Jughead’s are still closed, a dreamy smile on his face. More than ten years and, still, she feels that sweet ache in her chest whenever she looks at him. She lifts her glass and it catches the light, reflecting the facets of the new weight on her left hand.

“Now then, if this is to be our last night in Eden, I want you to dance with me.” Their cabin had come with a turntable and a collection of classic rock vinyls that had caused JB to text her a disturbingly long string of emojis when Betty sent her a photo a couple of days ago. When Jughead refilled their wine just now, he put on Springsteen’s “Born to Run” album, and so the music floats out the window on the evening breeze.

He opens his eyes and squints at her. “Only because it’s our last night.” Then he kisses her on the tip of the nose and pulls her to her feet.

After a minute or two of awkward shuffling, they find a rhythm, barefoot on the bare dirt. Her nails scratch at the nape of his neck and his thumb sweeps across the back of her hand where he holds it.

By the third track, Jughead gets into it, twirling her and dipping her with a skill that she knows he has, but that always surprises her when it emerges. He swallows her laugh in a kiss while she’s bent back, then he launches her forward, catching her against his chest and hugging her tight. Eventually, they settle into a gentle sway, her face in his neck and his arm wrapped around the small of her back, fingers brushing the space between her hip bone and her ribs.

Their mellow rocking lulls her into a trance so that she doesn’t even notice when the music stops. But Jughead breaks it with a husky whisper in her ear: “Have you thought any more about my idea?”

She rubs her cheek on his shoulder before looking up at him. “Yeah, but I’m just not sure about…um, about it.”

“Well, not to put any pressure on you, but we are running out of time.”

She murmurs, “Mhm.”

“And, you know, we’ve done much kinkier shit than this. I seem to recall a certain favourite Hitchcock blonde of mine in a leather get up in a hotel in San Francisco”

“I know, but it’s not that.”

“What is it then, baby?”

“It’s just…Mom’s not wrong when she says I’m working all the time. I can’t remember the last time I went to the gym and we’ve been eating so much take out lately. Some of my shorts are feeling a little snug.”

He pulls back and raises his eyebrows at her. “Really? That’s what you’re worried about, that your ass will look fat? I’ll have you know I stare at that ass every day and every day it just looks better and better.”

She sighs. That’s not what she means. “You may have a slightly biased opinion.”

“So? Plus,” he pauses to drop a kiss on her shoulder. “You don’t even have to see it. I want you to watch yourself, that means face front.”

 

It’s not exactly about her ass, but the morning after they’d arrived she had caught him looking back and forth between it, where she stood in her panties and one of his t shirts in the bathroom brushing her teeth, and the antique standing mirror in the corner of the bedroom. It’s an ostentatious thing. Ornate and clunky with carved supports and lions’ paws for feet.

She spit and came to stand in the doorway. “What are you looking at, Jug?”

He smiled at her sleepily from the bed. “You, beautiful.”

Betty rolled her eyes and jumped on the bed so she landed beside him on her stomach. “And?”

“I was just thinking of how handy this mirror here is going to be.”

“Yeah, what for?”

He turned dark eyes on her and his voice dropped an octave. “Fucking you while you watch.”

Betty felt all the blood rush to her face. “Jughead!”

“What? Doesn’t that sound hot? I can’t think of anything better. We can put on a show for all the ghosts that must haunt this place.”

“What kind of ghosts haunt vacation cabins in the Adirondacks?”

“The kind of repressed nineteenth century ones that lived here before it was a vacation cabin.”

“So you want to spook the spooks with our crazy sex life?”

“Exactly.”

She kissed him before bouncing back out of the bed. “I’ll think about it if you get up and brush your teeth. I want to go on that hike.”

He caught her around the waist and pulled her back. “But I want to stay in bed and ravish you until it’s dark again.”

“There’s one flaw in your plan. There’s no food up here.”

While he contemplated solutions to that problem, she escaped his grasp and thundered down the stairs, mind whirring with the visual he’d planted there.

 

He’s still slowly spinning them to the sonata of the bullfrogs and the crickets. She knows he can tell her resolve is wavering. Because she does want to. Anything he suggests in that tone and she’s a goner, molten heat lapping at her stomach.

“Come on, Betts”

“I don’t know, Juggie”

“I’ll do five things on your list.”

“You really want it?”

And she does trust him completely, trusts him to love her and to not see the extra ten pounds where they’ve settled on her hips. It’s her own gaze she’s afraid of.

Somehow, in the course of their dancing, he’s snuck a thigh between hers and he pulls her against him in just the right way. His voice is rough, scratchy.

“Think about it, Betty. You, naked in my lap riding me. Your tits bouncing—”

“My thighs jiggling.”

He pinches her hip before continuing. “The contrast of your skin again mine. Watching yourself fall apart. I love you. You coming is the hottest thing I’ve ever seen. I want you to know how glorious you are.”

With her back to the house, his eyes are lambent in the porch light. They hold the answers to all of her questions. And they hold the promise that’s sustained her since she was a teenager, frightened and angry but never again alone.

So, she nods against his neck and presses a kisses to his jawline. She feels the muscles move as he smiles and the burst of joy in her chest is like unlocking a door and stepping through to the sunlight. She breathes deeply, thankful in the knowledge that he’ll once again help her to conquer her fears.

 

Inside, Jughead breaks away from her to flip the record so “Born to Run” can chase them up the stairs. Betty extinguishes all the lights and they meet at the landing.

The stairs creak as they climb them, the old house protesting at the friskiness of its young, lovestruck inhabitants. Yellowed lace curtains flutter like handkerchiefs lifted in horror.

Jughead pauses to take her mouth in a kiss, his hands hurriedly unbuttoning her dress and sliding inside to brush against her breasts until her nipples pucker. Then he tugs her hand and her dress flows behind them in his haste.

The old lamps in the bedroom still have incandescent lightbulbs which—between that and the scarves arranged artfully over the top of them—will at least be more flattering than their more environmentally-friendly alternatives. Betty’s thankful for small mercies, and for the warm, yellow glow glancing off the pine walls and bathing the room in soft light and shadowed corners.

Jughead grabs the chair from its place beside the table and slides it over the uneven wooden floor boards until it’s a few feet in front of the mirror. Then he frowns at it and slides it back a little further. Betty stands in the doorway, bunching the material of her dress in her hands.

“Come here.” He pulls her to him so they’re standing in front of the chair, and hugs her back to his chest. His arms form a stripe of brown where they hug her pale stomach.

“Look at me, Betty.” Her eyes find his in the mirror. “I want you to let go and let me take care of you, okay?” She nods. “Good.” Then he slides one of her arms up so it’s behind his head and he kisses her so thoroughly the air whooshes all the way down her body and back up and she’s lightheaded.

He’s playing with her breasts, pinching and pulling and stroking, and she’s getting antsy, rubbing her ass against him. He releases her mouth with a scrape of his teeth against her bottom lip.

“Now look at yourself again. Look how pink and swollen your lips are. And look at your chest heaving and that pretty blush that spreads down. I wonder what I’d have to do to get it to reach your belly button.” He brushes her hair so it rests over her far shoulder and nips at her ear before kissing her neck. Betty has always hated her pale skin, how anyone can tell what she’s feeling by how she flushes so easily. Once, she’s pretty sure she blushed just cause someone looked at her funny. But when Jughead describes it, when she sees through his eyes, she feels beautiful.

Then his hands reach up and push her dress to the floor, his foot kicking it away so she’s standing in front of him, in front of the mirror, in only her days of the week underwear—it’s the wrong day too. She’s wearing her Thursday panties on a Sunday.

But his hand skims down the plane of her stomach and brushes against her and she loses her train of thought. He sucks a hickey onto the back of her neck as he touches her over the damp cotton.

“Are you wet for me?” He hits a spot that sends an electric current through her body and she gasps. “Yes.”

“Are you ready to take these off then?”

“Please.”

“Go on then.” And she does, bending over and then kicking them away while he slides off his own jeans and tank top. Then he pulls her back against him, all warm flesh and goosebumps. His cock nestles in the cleft of her ass and she fights the urge to roll her hips.

He uses one of his feet to slide hers farther apart, then reaches a hand back down. He dips a finger inside her then spreads the moisture around and strumsher clit, before repeating the circuit.

“Do you need a warm-up?”

“N-no,” she manages to stutter out.

“Okay.” He lets go of her to sit on the chair, then pulls her back and guides her onto his lap.

“Jug?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Fuck me now.”

“You got it.” Then he spreads his knees so hers are hooked over his and she can see herself, so wet she glistens in the mirror.

“Lean up for a second.” She complies and feels him lining himself up.

When she sinks down, her eyes roll back in her head, this position stretching the muscles in a new way.

She makes a tentative circle with her hips.

“There you go, honey.” Jughead peppers kisses across her shoulder blades as she experiments with direction and pace until she finds a rhythm that hits her clit on every pass. He intertwines one hand with hers and hugs it against her, while the other continues to caress her breasts.

Her gaze flits around, from their hands to objects in the room. Whenever it lands on the mirror, he’s staring at her, his gaze focused on where their bodies join, on where he slips in and out of her. She knows it should be lewd, obscene. But god if it isn’t the hottest thing she’s ever seen.

After a few minutes of letting her be in charge, she can feel him tensing beneath her, can feel him itching to push them harder. So she leans back and lets her head fall onto his shoulder. She lets him take control of her and lets him free her from herself.

He scoots forward on the seat of the chair so he can brace his legs on the floor for better leverage. His hands move to her hips as he thrusts upward and pulls her down in time. She knows when he starts to lose control because his hips begin to stutter and he pulls back, slowing them down and wrapping one arm back around her stomach while the other moves to rub gentle circles on her clit. 

She clenches her hands on the ropey muscles of his arm and squeezes her eyes shut as she feels her own orgasm rushing towards her.

“Are you close?” She nods with her head still on his shoulder. Then she feels him skim a hand up her back and cord his fingers through her hair. He tilts her head forward. “Open your eyes, Betty.” It takes a tremendous amount of effort, but she does and she meets his in the mirror. Her mouth falls open and she knows she’s panting, a high-pitched yelping noise that she can’t control.

His whisper in her ear sends shivers down her spine. “Look at yourself. This is what I see when I close my eyes at night. When I rub one out in the shower thinking of you. When I look at you, I remember this gorgeous, glazed look on your face and I know I put it there. Because you’re mine. You’re mine, Betty Cooper, forever and always.”

Then he sucks a kiss below her ear and she’s gone.

In the years they’ve been together, Jughead’s given her more orgasms than Rain Man could count. He’s given her fireworks and starbursts and glass shattering and earthquakes. Her favourite, though, is the wave the starts in the soles of her feet and rolls through her, curling everything from her toes up to her hair, a slow contraction and release that leaves her breathless.

When she gets her breath back, Jughead’s forehead is pressed into her shoulder blade and she can feel his heavy breathing. She can also feel their hot come, where it’s begun to seep out and roll down her thigh.

He lifts her off and holds her steady while he stands, a move for which she feels an appreciation she can’t put into words at the moment. When she can stand on her own, she sneaks into the bathroom to pee and clean herself up.

When she comes back out, Jughead has collapsed onto the bed. She crawls toward him and snuggles up by his side. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and plays with a strand of her hair as she strokes a foot up and down his calf.

“Maybe we should look into getting a cheval mirror.”

She feels more than hears his answering chuckle as it reverberates in his chest beneath her ear.

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve hit the point where I’ve picked a real town in upstate NY to serve as my headcanon Riverdale so I can actually calculate how long it takes to drive places.


End file.
